But Oshiomhole, through his media aide, said on Thursday that the opposition PDP was working with aggrieved members of his party to tarnish his image because of his refusal to be used to undermine democratic ideals which the APC is striving to build.

And speaking to newsmen after meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on Friday, Oshiomhole laughed off reports of crisis in his party.

While denying that he collected bribes during the party’s primaries, the APC chief insisted that the ruling party was in a good position to retain power in 2019.

He said: “The unfortunate thing here, however, is that people, who specialize in libels they take advantage of our peculiar judicial system.

“When I was a governor in Edo state, they published all kinds of things against me. At a point I decided to go to court and my lawyer told me that I have to be ready to enter the witness box to make my case – whether I was ready to go through that humiliation.

“What is in the governorship? Before I became the governor I entered the witness box and I know after being governor I can still go back there one day. So I went there and I won the case. They awarded damages in my favour.

“But by the time you want to check the process of the guy who libeled you and so on, he sales himself everything put together he could not compensate for by legal fee not to talk of really mitigating my paying as a result of the judgment.’’

John Andah is a fine-grained journalist. He has been a member of the fourth estate for nearly a decade. He loves the smell of a good lead, and has a penchant for finding out something nobody else knows. John is Snr Asst Editor at Concise News.